271-273 AC
The glassworks changed everything.
Not overnight. Nothing ever changed overnight, no matter what the songs claimed. But season by season, year by year, the trickle of gold became a stream, and the stream became a river. Northern lords who had once looked at Winterfell with the casual indifference of distant cousins now rode north with requests, with offers, with carefully worded suggestions of alliance.
And at the center of it all, a boy with white hair and green eyes watched and calculated and planned.
Kaelen was eight years old when the first outside order arrived. Lord Umber, whose lands bordered the Gift and whose people knew cold better than most, wanted glass for his keep at Last Hearth. Not for luxury, he wrote in his rough hand. For survival. The winters were hard in the far north. Every pane of clear glass meant less heat lost, less wood burned, more children alive when spring came.
Rickard read the letter aloud in the great hall, and for a long moment, no one spoke.
Then Kaelen said, "Send it to him for half price."
Rickard raised an eyebrow. "Half price? The Umbers can pay."
"I know." Kaelen met his father's eyes. "But the Umbers guard our northern border. They bleed for the North when the wildlings come. They lose sons and daughters to the cold while southern lords sit by their fires. We do not need their gold. We need their loyalty."
Rickard stared at his second son for a long moment. Then he laughed, that deep surprised laugh that Kaelen was beginning to recognize.
"You are eight years old," he said.
"Yes, Father."
"You are eight years old, and you think like a lord of forty."
Kaelen considered this. "I watch," he said. "I learn."
Rickard shook his head, but he was smiling. "Half price it is. And write the letter yourself. Let Lord Umber know who made this decision."
So Kaelen wrote his first official correspondence. The words were simple, the hand still childish, but the message was clear: House Stark valued its northern neighbors. House Stark remembered that the pack survived together.
Lord Umber's response came three moons later. It was a single sheet of parchment, and on it, in thick awkward letters, were four words:
The North remembers, boy.
Kaelen kept that letter for the rest of his life.
Harry Stone was the first person who ever looked at Kaelen and saw not strangeness but potential.
They worked together in the forge almost every day now. Harry had a gift for understanding what Kaelen described, for translating the boy's careful words into something real. Clay and stone and fire became furnaces. Sand and lime became glass. Iron and coal became steel.
Not Wolf Steel yet. That was still years away. But better steel than the North had seen in generations.
"You think different," Harry said one afternoon, wiping sweat from his brow. They had just pulled a fresh blade from the quench, and it gleamed in the firelight. "You do not think like a boy. You do not even think like most men."
Kaelen examined the blade, looking for flaws. "Is that a problem?"
"For me?" Harry laughed. "No. For you? Maybe. The world does not like different, little lord. The world likes things that fit. Things that make sense. You..." He gestured vaguely. "You do not fit."
Kaelen set the blade down carefully. "I know."
"Does it bother you?"
The question hung in the air between them. Kaelen considered it with the same careful attention he gave to everything else. Did it bother him? In his previous life, he had been different too. Brilliant, strange, impossible to understand. He had learned to work alone, to trust only his own mind, to expect nothing from others.
But that was before Brandon. Before his mother. Before Harry.
"Yes," he said quietly. "It bothers me."
Harry nodded slowly. "Good."
"Good?"
"Means you are still human." Harry picked up another piece of iron, turning it over in his calloused hands. "I have been different my whole life. Bastard. Outcast. Not welcome at any table. It hurts. It always hurts. But you learn to find your people." He looked at Kaelen. "I found mine."
Kaelen understood. He did not say anything. He did not need to. But that night, lying awake while Brandon snored beside him, he thought about Harry's words.
Find your people.
He was working on it.
Maester Walys watched the boy's rise with growing unease.
He wrote to the Citadel often now, his letters coded and careful. The boy was too clever. Too ambitious. Too popular with the northern lords who came to Winterfell and left speaking of young Kaelen's wisdom, young Kaelen's generosity, young Kaelen's vision for the North.
The glassworks have made the Starks wealthy, he wrote. Wealthy enough to influence lords who once stood independent. Wealthy enough to think beyond their borders. The boy speaks of steel next, of roads, of things that should take years of study but which he seems to understand instinctively.
I have attempted to guide his education toward more appropriate subjects. History. Heraldry. The proper role of a second son. He listens politely and then returns to his forge, his experiments, his plans.
I do not know what he is. But I fear what he may become.
The Citadel's response, when it came, was frustratingly vague.
Observe. Report. Do not interfere unless the boy threatens the balance.
Walys read the words three times, searching for meaning between the lines. There was none. The Citadel was far away, comfortable, unconcerned with the stirrings of a child in the distant North. They did not see what he saw. They did not feel what he felt.
But Walys did. And Walys would be ready.
Lyarra Stark was dying, and everyone knew it except the children.
Kaelen knew. He had known for months, watching his mother fade, watching the color drain from her cheeks, watching the light dim in her grey eyes. He had read enough in the maester's books to understand what was happening. Childbed fever, the aftereffects of Benjen's birth, slow and inexorable.
Maester Walys brought potions and poultices, spoke soothing words about rest and time, but Kaelen saw the way his hands moved, the way his eyes flickered when he thought no one was watching. Saw the tiny bottles he carried, the precise measurements, the careful attention.
He did not know what to do with what he saw. Not yet. He was only nine years old. He could barely reach the top shelf in the library. What could he do against a maester with decades of training and the full authority of the Citadel behind him?
So he watched. And he waited. And he sat with his mother every moment he could spare.
"Tell me a story," Lyarra whispered one evening, when the pain was bad and the fever high. "Tell me something wonderful."
Kaelen thought for a moment. Then he told her about glass. Not the practical glass of windows and trade goods, but the glass of his dreams. Glass that could bend light. Glass that could magnify the stars. Glass that could let men see things too small for the naked eye, worlds within worlds, mysteries hidden in a drop of water.
Lyarra listened, her eyes half closed, a small smile on her lips.
"That sounds like magic," she said when he finished.
"It is not magic. It is science. Understanding how things work."
"Is there a difference?"
Kaelen hesitated. In his previous life, he would have said yes, a firm and absolute yes. Science was truth. Magic was illusion. But here, in this world of dragons and shadows and things that walked in the dark, he was no longer so certain.
"I do not know," he admitted.
Lyarra reached up and touched his face, her fingers cool against his skin. "That is the first time you have ever said that. 'I do not know.'"
"Is that bad?"
"No, my little white wolf. It is good. The wise man knows what he does not know." She smiled, and for a moment she looked almost like her old self. "You will be a great man someday. Greater than your father. Greater than any Stark in a thousand years."
"I do not want to be great. I want you to get better."
Her smile faded. "I know. But that is not how the world works."
"It should be."
"Yes." She closed her eyes. "It should be."
Lyarra Stark died three days later.
Kaelen was not there when it happened. He had fallen asleep in his chamber, exhausted from days of sitting vigil, and when he woke, the castle was silent in that particular way that meant something had changed. He knew before anyone told him. He knew from the emptiness in the air, the absence of something that had been there his whole life.
He walked to the godswood and sat beneath the heart tree. The red leaves whispered above him. The snow fell softly. He did not cry. He had not cried since his first days in this world, when his infant body had forced tears from him against his will. But something inside him cracked, just a little, just enough to let a sliver of cold in.
His mother was gone. The only person who had ever truly understood him, who had looked at his strangeness and seen not a threat but a gift. Gone.
He did not know how long he sat there. Hours, maybe. The light shifted, the shadows lengthened, and still he sat. At some point, Brandon came and sat beside him. His twin did not speak. He did not try to comfort. He just sat, shoulder to shoulder, warm and solid and present.
Finally, when the stars had begun to appear overhead, Kaelen spoke.
"She said I would be great."
Brandon nodded.
"I would trade all of it. Everything I could ever be. Just to have her back."
"I know." Brandon's voice was rough. "I would too."
They sat together in the darkness, two boys who had lost the center of their world. The snow fell. The stars wheeled. The pack held together.
But something in Kaelen had changed. A door had closed, and behind it, something cold and hard was growing.
He would find out what happened to his mother. He would find out why Walys's potions had not worked, why the maester's eyes never quite met his, why the ravens flew south so often.
And when he found out, someone would pay.
From the Journal of Maester Walys, 273 AC
Lyarra Stark is dead. The boy has not wept. He has not raged. He has simply... withdrawn. He spends his days in the forge with the bastard, his nights in the library, his rare free moments in the godswood staring at the heart tree.
I do not like this. Grief I could understand. Grief I could guide, shape, use. This silence, this patience, this waiting... it unnerves me.
He asked me yesterday about the medicines I gave his mother. The dosage, the timing, the ingredients. His voice was calm, his eyes flat. I told him what any maester would tell a child. He nodded and walked away.
I do not think he believed me.
I do not think he believes anything I say.
The food revolution began in the same year Lyarra died.
Kaelen threw himself into work with an intensity that worried even Harry. He studied the granaries, the fields, the rotation of crops. He read every agricultural text in the library, and when those proved insufficient, he began experimenting.
Crop rotation was simple enough. The three field system had been known for centuries, but the North had never fully adopted it. Kaelen calculated the yields, the soil depletion rates, the optimal planting schedules, and presented his findings to Rickard.
"Three fields instead of two?" Rickard frowned at the charts Kaelen had drawn. "This will increase our harvest by how much?"
"Thirty percent in the first year. More as the soil improves."
"And you know this how?"
Kaelen hesitated. He could not explain about the agricultural revolutions of his previous life, about crop rotation and selective breeding and all the knowledge accumulated over ten billion years. So he told a partial truth.
"I read. I calculated. I experimented with the kitchen gardens."
Rickard looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded.
"Do it. Start with the Winterfell lands. If it works, we spread it to the other lords."
It worked.
The harvest that autumn was the largest in living memory. Granaries that had stood half empty for decades were suddenly overflowing. The smallfolk whispered that the white haired boy had blessed the fields, that the old gods favored him, that Lyarra's spirit watched over her strange son.
Kaelen heard the whispers and said nothing. Let them believe what they wanted. The food was what mattered. The food meant more children surviving winter. More strength for the North. More preparation for the storms to come.
Brandon noticed the change in his brother.
Kaelen had always been quiet, always calculating, always a little distant. But after their mother died, something shifted. The distance grew. The calculations became more intense. The quiet became something else, something harder.
"You do not have to do this alone," Brandon said one night, finding Kaelen in the library long after everyone else had gone to bed. Candles burned low around him, and he was surrounded by books and papers and notes in his tiny precise handwriting.
Kaelen looked up. "I know."
"Then why do you?"
"Because if I do not do it, no one will." He set down his quill. "Father rules. You will rule after him. Ned will be a lord somewhere. Benjen will have his own path. But someone has to think about the future. Someone has to prepare."
"For what?"
Kaelen was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "Winter."
Brandon frowned. "Winter always comes. We prepare every year."
"A different winter." Kaelen's green eyes were strange in the candlelight, old and young at the same time. "A winter that lasts years. A winter that kills everything. A winter that..."
He stopped. Shook his head.
"Never mind. I am tired. I should sleep."
Brandon watched him go, troubled by something he could not name. His brother saw things others did not. His brother knew things others could not. And sometimes, in moments like this, Brandon wondered if Kaelen saw things that should not exist at all.
---
The Winter Guard began with fifty men.
Kaelen approached Rickard with the request carefully, as he approached everything. Not as a demand, not even as a suggestion, but as a proposal backed by logic and evidence.
"The glassworks need protection. The steel we will soon produce needs protection. The North itself needs men who are more than levied farmers with rusty swords."
Rickard considered this. "We have guards."
"Castle guards. Good men, but trained for castle duty. I am talking about something different. Professionals. Men who train every day, who answer only to House Stark, who can march anywhere in the North at a moment's notice."
"And who will command these men?"
"I will. With Brandon's help." Kaelen met his father's eyes. "I am nine years old. I know. But I also know what I am doing. Give me fifty men for one year. Train them my way. If it fails, you lose nothing. If it succeeds..."
Rickard laughed. "If it succeeds, you have an army."
"A small one. For now."
"Nine years old." Rickard shook his head, but he was smiling. "Fine. Fifty men. One year. Show me what you can do."
The training was brutal.
Kaelen had no experience training soldiers in this life, but he had memories. Memories of watching elite forces in his previous existence, of understanding what made them effective. Discipline. Repetition. Standards that did not bend.
Harry helped. Harry was older, stronger, better with a sword. But Harry also understood what Kaelen was trying to build. Not just soldiers. A brotherhood. A unit. Men who would die for each other because they had trained together, bled together, suffered together.
"Again," Kaelen would say, standing on a barrel to be seen, his white hair bright in the sun. "Your formation broke. Again."
The men grumbled. They cursed. They muttered about being trained by a child. But they also saw the results. After three months, they moved better than any soldiers in the North. After six, they could hold formation against twice their number. After a year, they were something new.
Kaelen called them the Winter Guard. Fifty men who answered only to the Starks. Fifty men who would be the core of something much larger.
And when the year was up, Rickard came to watch them train. He watched for an hour, his face unreadable. Then he turned to Kaelen.
"How many do you want next year?"
"Two hundred."
Rickard nodded slowly. "You will have them."
That night, Brandon found Kaelen on the walls, looking out at the training yard where the Guard had drilled.
"You did it," Brandon said. "Father is impressed. The lords are talking. Everyone wants to know about the white haired boy and his army."
"It is not an army. Not yet."
"But it will be." Brandon leaned on the parapet beside him. "What are you building, Kaelen? Really?"
Kaelen looked at the stars. They were the same stars he had known in another life, another world, arranged in different patterns but still burning with the same cold fire. Somewhere out there, beyond the Wall, something waited. Something that had waited for thousands of years.
"I am building a future," he said. "For us. For our children. For everyone who comes after."
"And the enemy? The one you mentioned? The winter that lasts years?"
Kaelen turned to face his brother. In the starlight, his white hair seemed to glow, his green eyes ancient and young at once.
"I hope I am wrong," he said. "I hope my fears are nothing but nightmares. But if I am right... if they come..."
"Then we will be ready."
"Yes." Kaelen placed his hand on Brandon's shoulder. "We will be ready. The pack survives."
Brandon nodded slowly. "The pack survives."
They stood together in the darkness, two boys on the edge of something vast and unknown. Behind them, Winterfell slept. Before them, the future waited.
And in the shadows, a maester watched from his tower window, his chains clinking softly as he wrote another letter to the Citadel.
The boy builds an army. The boy speaks of winters that last years. The boy is dangerous.
Send instructions.
Send help.
Before it is too late.
Coming in Chapter 3: The Steel and the Stone
New discoveries. New enemies. And the first whispers of war.